Shaping the Life of the New Woman: The Crusading Years of the Delineator

Abstract

Few periodicals have had such an illustrious history as The Delineator (1873-1937), yet few publications are more obscure. It began as the brainchild of tailor/pioneer pattern designer Ebenezer Butterick to market his paper sewing patterns and provide fashion news to post-Civil War middle-class American women (Figure 1). The Delineator quickly became the flagship publication of the Butt erick Publishing Company (not officially organized until the year 1902). Patterns soon became secondary in importance to the magazine itself, whose circulation leaped from 30,000 in 1876 to 480,000 by the turn of the century. By 1920 it numbered more than a million subscribers, and the number doubled again by the time of the Great Crash.1 A key to The Delineator's success was its focus on the changing roles of women themselves and women's gradual, though not total, move away from home and hearth into colleges, clubs and organiza tions, the professions, and into the large arena of municipal reform during the so-called Progressive period of the early decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the female middle-class readership of The Delineator could perform valuable patriotic and civic duties in policing morals, expanding its role in supervision of child welfare, and Americanizing the millions of immigrants who seemed to threaten old-stock America. The Delineator's pages champi oned both women's reform-minded involvement in eradicating social ills in city and state and their important job as traditional conservative protectors of family values in a rapidly changing America. As with the Progressive movement itself, there are sometimes mixed messages, paradox, and irony in Delineator coverage of women's redefinition of themselves as the nineteenth century came to an end and a new mil lennium dawned.